Fated to the Wrong Alpha

Chapter 9 – After the Shock

For a moment, there is only light.

White-hot, pouring through every vein, every nerve, every ragged edge of the bond between us. I feel Corren’s howl tear through my chest as if it’s mine. Feel my own voice shred on his name.

Then—impact.

The light slams back into the symbols on the floor like a wave hitting stone. Something cracks. Not in us.

Below the elevator, the ritual shudders out of sync.

“Hold on,” Corren snarls, his hands steel on my shoulders. His wolf is in his voice, in his grip, pouring raw power down the line between us.

My mark is a brand, searing-hot. The hooks in our bond twist, trying to tear free.

No.

I don’t know if I say it out loud or just think it, but I grab the only thing I can reach—the connection between us, thin and bloody and half-strangled—and I pull back.

Not away. Toward.

For a heartbeat, I feel them.

Not just Corren.

Echoes. Faint, flickering presences braided into the same brutal knot. A flash of lilies and panic—Elira’s fear, sharp as knives. Another, older weight, grief-sodden and heavy, someone I don’t know.

We are a tangle of lives someone tried to rewrite.

The voice below us hisses, furious. “Let go.”

My wolf bares her teeth. Ours.

Heat surges from my chest into my hands, into the bond. Corren’s energy slams into it from the other side, matching mine instinctively. We’re not trying to tear free. We’re bracing, anchoring, refusing to be moved.

The light column wavers.

Ritual lines on the floor stutter, some flaring, some going dark. The smell of burning herbs and scorched metal floods the cramped space.

“Whoever you are,” Corren grits out, “you don’t own this.”

For a split second, the presence behind the voice slips. I feel something like surprise. Rage. Fear.

Then everything snaps.

The light implodes, sucked back into the fractured sigils with a sound like glass breaking underwater. A pressure wave slams into us, knocking us both into the wall. The elevator jerks, cables screaming, then lurches down another half meter before emergency brakes finally catch with a bone-rattling jolt.

Silence.

Darkness.

Only the harsh rasp of our breathing, tangled together.

I blink spots from my eyes. The ritual markings on the floor are fading, leaving only scorched metal and hairline cracks.

“Aeryn.” Corren’s voice is rough, but there. His hands frame my face, thumbs brushing my temples. “Look at me.”

I do.

The bond is…different.

Still there. Still wrong. But where it was frayed and strangled, there’s now a raw, open path between us, humming with shared pain and something stubbornly alive. And underneath it all, a new echo: not a hook, not a chain, but a faint, distant thread leading away from us.

To whoever they’ve tied to us.

“You feel that?” I whisper.

He swallows, eyes dark. “We’re not the only ones in this.”

Sirens wail somewhere in the guts of the building. Metal groans. Voices shout above.

Corren lets out a shuddering breath, still cupping my face as if to prove I’m solid.

“They tried to rip us apart,” he says.

“But they didn’t,” I reply, pulse hammering. “They just proved something’s there worth tearing.”